Since about 2014 I played with the idea to retire at age 40. I am 45 now and although i quit my job in 2016 as planned, i am busier than ever working on social and environmental impact projects.

When are we allowed to retire? What it the meaning of retirement in exponentially changing labor markets? Is it unemployment or just a different lifestyle, one which allows dignity and detachment from the daily craziness our capitalist economies require from us?

This BBC video about millenials retiring at age 30 is inspiring, but it also reveals a pretty negative trend: the decline of social capital or what French sociologist called anomie, i.e. a lack of alignment within society. In the end, we can only change ourselves and need to start where impact can be created. Waiting for others to transform does not pay off.

F.I.R.E. is short for Financial Independence and Retire Early. Its a self-reliant exit strategy from the rat race our economic systems put us into. It is a method to accelerate the transformation towards an universal basic income. Only knowledge workers can take that path and it is way easier without dependents.

It surely is yet another indicator of a society that needs healing.

its not only the quest for certainty. its also decreasing neuroplasticity. the difficult part about breaking with conformity is the transition to an alternative mode of operation. When we loose the railing that has given us guidance for such a long time, we stop anxiously in the dark. Looking for something to hold on, we fall back into old habits and world views. the only lighthouse emotion which has the power to guide us out of this synaptic maze is joy.

Labor day. May 1 is basically this blog's birthday. A reason to celebrate the most undervalued instinct of mankind: work. We all want good and fulfilling work. Deep down somewhere it is our very nature. How did Pope Francis write in his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si? We were created with a vocation to work.

Watch here my most favorite animation on work: El Empleo

Many people I talk to think that good work has nothing to do with the climate crisis. They are wrong. People who are frustrated in their jobs do not contribute positively to our societies and compensate their frustration with excessive consumption. They might be loyal consumers and obedient citizens but they eat up themselves and the planet.

Ken Robinson explained in his 2010 TED talk that job frustration is a problem of education.

I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you're talking about. It isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. And I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times in the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.

If you are reading this and you are already past your education years, then I invite you to assess your working situation with a few scaling questions. If you score low, consider to quit your job and do something different. Its never too late to move into a career that matters. To you. and the world.

This rambling 30 page essay on play as a learning method was written in 2019. It sat on my desktop waiting for more to come. I have read it today and found it is good to go.

Our daughter Zoe asked to watch for our last movie-Friday GIFTED, a drama about a prodigy child directed by Marc Webb. I warmly recommend to watch that film when reading this essay.

Feb. 21, 2021. Since November we have been walking once a month as plastic pirates through this neighborhood, which we call our new home since September, and use tweezers, gloves and garbage bags to collect the rubbish that is carelessly thrown into nature by fellow citizens. Today, we were the forth time on the road as Plastic Pirates around the old Glanzstoff factory. We captured 19 kilograms in just under two hours of raid. Time to take a step back and contemplate.

I had imagined Austria differently. At least I remembered it differently. Clean. Neat. Close to nature. I was abroad for 20 years. Now I'm back in this country with my children and I'm disappointed and worried at the same time. Disappointed about the state of nature in St. Pölten and the surrounding area. Concerned about the apathy with which this condition is met and about the smoldering anger I see in conversations with native residents.

Austria has turned in relative terms and not taking into consideration countries places like UAE or Luxembourg into one of the top 5 global immigration nations after Australia and Sweden, but before Germany or the United States. In cities like STP one third of residents have a migration background. A clash of cultures is underway, which will exacerbate with population growth and climate crisis caused migration for the years to come. The waste we see in nature is a physical manifestation of this brewing tension.

I have been collecting rubbish for 10 years. It all started with a vacation in the Philippines on the island of Boracay, where I had to surf my kiteboard on a beach polluted by tourist sewage. No fun. At first there was just disappointment, but then the decision quickly came to have to contribute something myself. A few years later, the island was completely closed to tourism due to an ecological mega-disaster, but I had made the habit of collecting rubbish for one day of my vacation and thus giving something back to my host country.

For the past three years I've been hunting rubbish once a month, no matter where I am, and I think a lot about the future of work and education. My wife is still irritated, but the children like to be there when we run new routes. In St. Pölten, too, we wanted to get to know a new route on Sunday, because I had believed that three cleanings around the gloss fabric would be sufficient. In addition, shortly after our January mission, the municipal waste service thoroughly disposed of the rubbish along Herzogenburgerstrasse.

Unfortunately not. In fog and light rain we went our usual route and when we reached Traisenpark Süd, a local shopping center, our handcart was fully loaded with rubbish. It is worrying that more than 80% of our prey consists of new contamination, ie it was disposed of in nature between our last mission a month ago and this Sunday.

Dealing with rubbish is perhaps not a pleasant but incredibly formative process. On several levels. Physically, on a Plastic Pirates tour, I bend down at least 200 times and have completed a healthy workout in fresh air. Emotionally speaking, it feels good to free a piece of our planet from surface pollution - after such an activity dinner tastes better and I sink satisfied into the sofa, grateful for a day filled with purpose.

You also think about all kinds of things. What kind of rubbish is out there? Which people throw it away so carelessly? What's going on in their minds? What does the beaver that we finally got to see think when he's living among plastic trash? How can one counteract this human apathy and also aggression? What does it take to create more respect for public goods in a society?

We never get the time to move the old stock from the rest of the forest next to the mill river - my children now call it now just “the dump” - because nature fills with new rubbish in the four weeks between our operations. This new waste is made up of around 60% residual waste, 30% aluminum cans and 10% glass. It is noticeable that the majority of aluminum cans are energy drinks - these consumers cannot really be blamed, because they were too excited to notice the rubbish bins which are installed every 500 meters or so. A smaller part consists of beer cans. These consumers, in turn, usually no longer make it to the trash can because they are already heavily sedated. Mostly they cannot remember and are therefore difficult to be questioned about their motives.

Then there are a substantial number of cigarette packs. I didn't realize that so many people still smoke. With the cigarette butts around the benches, you could definitely fill another two big waste bags. This should be done at some point, because nota bene: one cigarette butt contaminates 40 liters of good drinking water. About a third of the residual waste comes from McDonalds. This company is currently advertising far beyond the boundaries of freedom of expression with “Touching allowed. Your handful of normality. ”Throwing away properly is also allowed and is part of normality.

After years in the automation industry, I am at least aware that our industrial companies produce packaging extremely efficient with robots and automated assembly lines. However, garbage that we throw into nature in a disorderly manner will still have to be collected by human hands in the coming years. There are no suitable machines for this yet. So if we don't want to run the risk of suffocating in our own rubbish, as shown in the Pixar film Wall-E, then we have to take appropriate measures now.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

These measures can quickly be traced back to the topic of motivation. Why do we behave as we would expect others to do? Why do we even behave in a certain way? Is it our own ideals and standards or is it the standards of others and society that lead us to do things or not to do them?

Modern people are self-sufficient and are no longer interested in what others think of them as long as they have found favor on facebook or instagram. Modern society withdraws more and more from the important questions. One lives plurality in every respect. Sexual behavior. Consumer behavior. Disposable Habits. Just do it.

The result is a disoriented youth, paralyzed teachers, apathetic parents and cultural weakness. What does it actually mean to be from here? To be entitled to dispose one's garbage in nature or to take responsibility for this place and to free nature from garbage? How long does a form of coexistence work that does not establish basic behavioral norms and creates positive incentives to obey to them?

The renowned sinologist Oskar Weggel wrote in 1997 about a future with 12 billion people, cramped spaces and scarce raw materials: in such an environment the glorification of the individual must be as it has become established in modern philosophy - and in the western industrialized countries , appear as a “luxury creation” that is neither appropriate to human history as a whole nor to the prospects of a “post-European” age.

Classical Confucianism was a child of need - and as such gave answers to the question of how distribution struggles can be resolved bloodlessly and how forms of close proximity can be designed as conflict-free as possible. In a sign of diminishing options and increasing constriction, it could once again prove to be a refuge and advisor! Globalization would then unfold the other way around, namely from east to west!

A comparison with the city-state of Singapore, in which about as many people live as in Austria, comes to mind. Since 1968, citizens have been educated there to keep their land clean, not only with gentle instructions, but with hefty fines of at least 300 Singapore dollars. Over 56,000 people are registered as voluntary garbage collectors and support the government in its efforts to make Singapore a model country. Retirees in particular like to meet in groups and roam the area like the raping Huns.

In Singapore, both forms of motivation have worked together to improve the environmental situation. On the one hand, high fines are an extrinsic motivation to dispose of nothing wildly, on the other hand, the groups that like to meet repeatedly to collect rubbish are an opportunity to socialize and do meaningful activity instead of being lonely at Netflix and McDonalds at home.

It is obvious that something must be done. An employee of the municipal gardening company recently told us at the Viehofner See that he and a colleague of us are exclusively occupied with collecting rubbish. Every 5-10 days they go around the lake in winter and daily in summer. The loading area of ​​her emergency vehicle is always full. The garbage has doubled since Corona because people are outside a lot more. How would the throw-away behavior change if surveillance cameras are set up along the Mühlbach or at the parking lots at Viehofner See and littering is punished with fines?

With Plastic Pirates, a format that we developed three years ago in Shanghai, we are trying the path of intrinsic motivation and especially invite children and families to take on “stewardship” for a small part of our planet in a playful way. Our participants are made up in a warlike manner and receive an eye patch with which it is all the more difficult to operate the gripper in such a way that something is actually transported into the common garbage bags.

Green Steps combines best practices from alternative pedagogy and the latest learning psychology to improve the learning outcome and experience of the participants. Children form small pirate crews and fill garbage bags that are weighed on electronic scales. In an opening group, children learn about the different types of rubbish in general and plastic in particular.

We use storytelling and object manipulation as a method to strengthen long-term memory and establish healthy habits. The contents of all garbage bags are sorted together and each child takes an object and tells a story in a reflection circle about how it ended up in nature. Events like Plastic Pirates are organized in neighborhoods with a high percentage of residents with a migrant background. Children learn in a playful way to respect the environment and to have fun as a group.

Interested? Take a look at our event platform and become a pirate! Crew recruiting every third Sunday of the month.

[1]Knut Wimberger, The Future of Work and What We Can Do Now
[2]Oskar Weggel, China im Aufbruch: Konfuzianismus und politische Zukunft
[3]https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181025-the-cost-of-keeping-singapore-squeaky-clean